MBA1171 How To Pivot With Your Product

Oh, could this vintage store be any cuter?

Right?

And the best part? They accept Discover. Except Discover in a little place like this? I don't think so. Jennifer. Oh yeah, huh? Discover's accepted where I like to shop. Come on baby, get with the times.

Right.

So we shouldn't get the parachute pants. These are making a comeback, I think.

Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide, based on the February 2025 Nielsen report.

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Foreign. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show Practical Business lessons every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. In today's lesson, you will learn how to pivot with your product. Sometimes when you launch a product, it's not exactly the way it should be. We have all the right intentions. We've done all our homework, we did all the planning. We create the product and we release it to the world and then we get customer feedback, right? And being able to adjust and pivot is critical for you to be successful and have sustainable growth. That means sometimes adjusting and changing your product. How do you do this? How do you pivot without losing the vision of your product or the core values or creating something you just don't want to have a business you don't want to manage? Pivoting properly to create a better product is an essential skill for every entrepreneur. And the best businesses out there change and adapt. And those who don't go out of business, look at Kodak. When things went digital, they just didn't adapt. They didn't pivot with their product. But if you look at a company like Netflix that was delivering DVDs, as soon as, you know, Internet speeds started to speed up, they pivoted to online streaming. So in today's lesson, we're going to ask some questions, the right questions to know how to pivot with our product, how to improve it and make sure we continue to grow. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. When we launched our product webinar Ninja, our webinar Software. Back in 2014 it was totally different than what it is today. We were actually a WordPress plugin for a bit before we became a cloud based platform and we had to pivot the product, we had to change the product and, and essentially re engineer it because when we launch the product we realize that hey, we can't really have control over the quality of every webinar. Why? Because if you have a WordPress plugin, you're dependent on your actual user's hosting provider. Not everybody's going to have a dedicated server for their website. By having a cloud based platform, we're able to ensure consistent quality and deliver it to a all our customers because things are on our servers and not theirs. Instead of telling customers, hey, tough luck, that's your problem. You know, you should beef up your server power for your website so your webinars go well. We say, hey, no, we're going to take responsibility to make sure your webinars go well every single time. No matter how many people are on the webinar, no matter how much traffic you have to your website or to your webinar for that matter. And that required us to pivot to change our product to. There's one question you need to ask to know what is the first step in pivoting with your product? And that's what's the number one reason why people either don't buy your product or leave your product? Stop becoming a customer, stop paying you money, or stop becoming a repeat customer. Right. Regardless if you're selling content or consulting or you sell physical products. And the best way to do that, the best way to find out is through exit surveys or customer satisfaction surveys. So when somebody purchases your product, even if it's a physical product, you need to get some answers. You need to get some information from them, some feedback. Yes, it's nice to know what they like about the product, but you really need to know what they don't like, what they struggle with the most. So you can improve the product if you have a software company or a reoccurring type of payment, like with a program or an online course, when people leave your membership, you gotta give them an exit survey. Find out, hey, why did you leave? What was the biggest problem? Now some people are gonna say, hey, it's just not a good time for me or I couldn't afford it. But a good amount of people will give you honest feedback and they actually appreciate the fact that you're asking. Shows that you care and you wanna improve now you may get a different array of answers, but what you're looking for here is the number one answer. You can't work on everything at once. You wanna focus on the most important thing that you can change, that you can pivot with. And we do this till this day. Just recently we pivoted and released a new feature called the Page Builder. When we launched webinar Ninja 5.0 last year, our latest iteration, we created some simple registration pages that are clean and easy and high converting and you can change them and customize them just a bit. But it wasn't highly customizable and we thought, hey, this is easy and people are going to love it because you don't have to, you know, play with it too much. We learned from those exit surveys, from feedback from customers that hey, they want to be able to create their own registration pages, their own thank you pages, and customize it even more. The feedback was so overwhelming that we dedicated six months to building this feature and pivoting the product. It's totally okay to change. In fact, it's good to change and evolve. But it should be based on information, not on hunches, not on what you think is gonna work. The best way to do it is to get some information out of your customers, people that are users, people that have experience what you are selling, what you actually offer, and take that information to improve your product, make some changes that will actually matter. And in fact, when you make these changes, you can reach out to all those people that left you or didn't buy from you again and say, hey, we made the change that you were looking for. We'd love for you to join us today and you can recoup those losses. Now when you pivot with your product, it has to be strategic. You have to plan it properly and you gotta make sure it's not such a drastic change that your current users, your current customers are not totally thrown off. You also want to communicate this pivot to your customers well in advance. Let them know that what you're doing, what you're working on, get some feedback from them as you're working on this pivot. Even if this is a refresh of your website or your members area for your course, this affects their experience and you want to make sure that, hey, they're on board and they love to see what's going on and get a behind the scene glimpse of, of how you build your business, how you actually build a product that you're giving them. The more you communicate in this process, the better it's going to form all the little decisions you're going to be making throughout the pivot process. The other thing I want to add is you have to also keep an eye on the immediate future and make these changes to improve your product, but also in the long term future. How is the world going to change in 10 years? How are things going to look? What kind of tools will be available? How things will improve? If you're creating an online video course, maybe HD is totally fine for now, but if you want your content to age well, maybe shooting it in 4K is better. More and more people have 4K monitors and 4K TVs. And heck, our iPhones these days shoot in 4K now. So keep an eye out in the future. So that way you're ready to pivot and your product ages gracefully.

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From dry, tired, irritated eyes? Don't let dry eyes win. Use Sustain Pro. It hydrates, restores, and protects dry eyes for up to 12 hours. Sustain Pro Triple Action Dry Eye Relief. Many of us have a hard time pivoting with a product because we perceive it as a failure. Perceive that, hey, things are not going well. I failed at my mission, my product is not what it should be, and we get down on ourselves. No, you're just improving things. You're getting things better. At the end of the day, you want to be successful, so you got to do what it takes to be successful. The only thing that's guaranteed in life and in business is change. Things will change. You need to change with it. You need to adapt. You need to pivot. You need to make sure you're constantly improving. Because if you don't, your competition will. It's not a failure. It's foolproofing yourself for the future. Thank you so much for listening to the Hundred Dollar MBA show. If you love what you hear, leave us an itunes rating and review. We would love to hear from you. I read every single review. I'd love to hear what your favorite episode is, what your favorite takeaway is. Thank you in advance. For that. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Pivoting in your business is not easy often because we have the sunk cost fallacy. We have this idea of, wow, I invested all this time and money in building the product this way. I'm just going to keep on doing that because I don't want to feel like I lost so much time and money by changing things. What's done is done. It's all about the future. Are you going to continue to lose or not make as much money as you should, or will you pivot and invest and improving things? Don't get caught up in that sunk cost fallacy. All right, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode for ride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

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